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andydp
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Joined: 23 Sep 2003
Posts: 8122
Location: Upstate NY near Albany
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 Posted: 09/19/06 - 15:44 Post subject: Look !! Answers to life more persistent questions...
Got this e mail today. It certainly filld the void in my life's knowledge.
What does the American Indian word cowabunga mean?
Of course, pedant that I am, I must point out that there is not one Native American language, but rather hundreds of them. That out of the way, cowabunga is as Native American in origin as The Muppet Show's Swedish Chef's mutterings are Swedish. They both, in different generations, made television viewers laugh, but they are also both the creations of white guys of European extraction.
Almost any baby boomer will tell you that the first time he or she heard cowabunga (as it is now spelled), it was on the Howdy Doody Show. The program ran from 1947 to 1960; Eddie Kean, the show's main writer until 1954, invented Chief Thunderthud and Princess Summerfall Winterspring as characters. Chief Thunderthud was supposedly the founder of Doodyville, and began sentences with the nonsense syllable kawa. Anything that was good was "kawagoopa"; anything that was bad was "kawabonga." No one really has explained why this word for 'bad' was adopted by surfers in the 1960s (or, for that matter, why the spelling changed). Perhaps they already used the adjective bad to mean 'excellent'--a usage from Black English that became more widespread as jazz became more mainstream. And perhaps, if they wanted to shout something while surfing, "bad" didn't have enough syllables to sound like a really good way to say "killer wave, man."
And as long as we're speculating, there is a precedent in the use of Geronimo! for daredevils borrowing an Indian (or Indian-sounding) word as an exclamation: the paratroopers of the 505th Battalion at Fort Benning, Georgia, after seeing the 1939 movie Geronimo, decided that would be a great word to shout as they jumped from the plane.
At any rate, if there are any aging beach boys out there who remember that a certain surfer first yelled cowabunga on a certain beach, word sleuths everywhere would love to hear about it. The word certainly has staying power, being resurrected by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the 1980s and by Bart Simpson in the 1990s.
As for Eddie Kean's fake Indian-speak, people have been mocking or mimicking other people's speech since the Greeks coined the term barbarian, which means 'bar-bar sayer' and really means 'those weird strangers whose language sounds like bar-bar-bar'. The practice underscores stereotypes and can be a tool for perpetuating racism, and I suspect that the same boomers who loved Howdy Doody as children would cringe if they listened to it now.
When everyone accepts the ground rules, however, linguistic difference is a rich source of humor, as The Muppet Show proves. You can even visit some sites and sing along with the Swedish Chef: Yorn desh born, der ritt de gitt der gue, Orn desh, dee born desh, de umn bork! bork! bork! Go on. You know you want to.
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